Remarks by Marshall Simien, Jr.
18 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 1 of 1
All right, I'm calling our August 29th agenda meeting to order.
We haven't come up with another plan yet, so we'll probably renew. We still have, even if we renew, we have the option to get out within 30 days, so. We just need to revisit that. We've been trying to get, obviously, that application in by the October 15 deadline.
Others are, we'd like for it to be more of a resolution and a guide for development as opposed to hardness because you come out with some unintended results when you do it that way.
Yeah, right now we have a moratorium because we're figuring out what's the next route to go because apparently the way it was working with CivicSource, the people weren't getting clear titles to do what they wanted to do with the properties. Basically what we were doing was passing on the city's grass-cutting obligations to the property owners. I recently got appointed to the Senate Task Force on Blighted Property, and that's something that we're going to be addressing. Blighted properties, what to do with those, but also how to get adjudicated properties back into commerce. I had come up…
We've noticed that too, that there's been an increase of unhoused people. I don't know if they're unhoused or not, but people just hanging out on some of the benches in front of the businesses, kind of panhandling, some sleeping on the benches. We contacted the marshal's office. Their office is right down the street. And they've been sending out, I think, Marshal Bellow has been walking and asking people to move on and we've asked to find out if we can to find out where they're coming from too because we've gotten some reports we haven't verified yet that some people may be dropping unhoused…
That's one for, I think it's panhandling, but those are like at interstate areas along major arteries. If they're in front of a business, I'm not quite sure how that works because, you know, we've seen some places like at the Walmarts where you've seen people panhandling, but they're on private property. So that's a different.
I'm not quite sure because I don't want to say they're all homeless because I think there's just some people that just walk around and then they decide to stretch out. We're trying to get together and figure out exactly how to address that. We've been asking them to move on. The ones that are actually sleeping on the benches, we tell them that they absolutely cannot do that. But in terms of enforcement, like trying to arrest them, you run into space at the jails and whether the sheriff's office would even accept them. So we're trying to be, you have to be sensitive if there are people that…
Yeah, I'd like to get that out to the general public, too, because it's not just the downtown businesses. I know that we've been having a lot of complaints at some of the shopping centers, too, about this kind of situation.
capsule parish the jail and see you know when those people are being released and do they have a destination because if they just letting them out to just go into the city and they don't have nowhere to go that problem is going to exacerbate itself yeah and you're right the one thing we find is that there's no two that have the same story so we have to it's going to probably be a more holistic look at it because everybody has their own unique circumstance why they're out there in the first place whether they're in-house, whether they're even traveling through the city. I ran across a a…
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
I know years ago we were dealing with one of the exit, the railroad storage yard is by Shattuck Street, and one of the crossings they had over there, there was a lot of complaints because at night they'd have to blow their horns because once they get so many feet from a crossing they have to blow their horn and that's at a hundred decibels speaking of noise ordinances so we wound up closing that intersection because the reason why they were blowing so much was because the the main engine was switching out train cars over there but further down by by that church that should not be a that…
And I think the first thing is to is to identify the people that's doing that. It used to be where when people on their way to the scrap metal yards, they would drop tires off because that didn't wait.
Well, sometimes we would put deer cameras when we had places where we knew there was a lot. I remember at one point, the intersection of Fitzgerald and Goss, somebody had actually taken out the street light at that corner, and we started seeing a bunch of tires, and we wound up putting deer cameras up there, and we found people. But what you also find is that when people go and change out their tires, they pay a disposal fee. But some of these shops are keeping that as profit because they're not disposing of the tires. I'll give you an example. When we did Riverside Park, we discovered in…
And let me be clear, because we meet regularly with all of the Lake Charles City Council on agendas that's coming up before the council on items that we are considering. And we've sent invitations to all of the councilmen to come up and talk with us about that. And every time, consistently, we've had six councilmen come up. And the only one that does not attend these meetings are you. And may I finish? May I finish?
You sent us a request to write reports for you because you said you don't trust what we tell you. I don't do business like that. If we can talk on the 10th floor, if there's something that you need, let's do that. But we conduct our business on the 10th floor. We come down here and conduct business on the first floor. I'm not doing business by text. By email I want to sit down and talk to you about whatever your concerns are and whatever you need but if you're asking us to stop everything we're doing and generate reports to you things that we are meeting regularly with councilmen about I just…
Nope. Did we get an answer back from HUD? Nope. I thought that item was deferred indefinitely to be heard back from HUD.
Not quoted here: it may name a member of the public. Hear it at the meeting.
I would not do that because you're inviting the public to your place, so they can be misconstrued as to who has permission and who doesn't.